Next story in Space

On the eve of space shuttle Discovery's final scheduled trip back
to Earth, the six astronauts aboard the spaceship paid tribute to
their tried and true orbiter.

"I think the legacy that this shuttle has made for herself is
just nothing short than cause for celebration," said mission
specialist Michael Barratt during a call with reporters today
(March 8). "Just something that our country should be very, very
proud of."

Discovery is finishing up its 39th and final voyage, a two-week
mission to deliver supplies and a robotic astronaut helper to the
International Space Station. [ Photos
from Discovery's Final Mission ]

After this STS-133 mission, only two more space shuttle flights
remain, and then NASA is retiring the fleet. Shuttle Endeavour is
slated to launch on its
STS-134 voyage in April, and Atlantis is scheduled to blast
off one last time on the STS-135 mission in June.

Over the course of
39 missions, Discovery has launched probes and satellites,
deployed the Hubble Space Telescope, and then visited to repair
it. The shuttle has also contributed significantly to the
construction and operation of the International Space Station.

"The legacy for the shuttle fleet and the shuttle program
undoubtedly, in my mind, will be the space station," LeRoy Cain,
NASA's mission management team chairman, told the media today.
"We could not have assembled this marvelous facility in orbit
without the capabilities of the space shuttle."

After the shuttles retire, they will be sent to U.S. museums for
public display.

"I don’t know what the plaque is going to say, but hopefully it
will talk about Discovery's legacy as a great ship of
exploration, as a class of spacecraft with capabilities …
unmatched by anything else we've ever seen in space and probably
unmatched for a long, long time to come," said Discovery's
commander, Steve Lindsey."Hopefully it will talk about not the
crews, not us, but the entire space shuttle teams that span
across the country that have allowed this to happen – the
thousands and thousands and thousands of people to keep this
vehicle running. Hopefully the legacy will be more about the
people than anything else."

Discovery and the other shuttles are being retired after 30 years
of service to make way for NASA's next step, a push to travel
beyond low-Earth orbit to an asteroid and Mars. The space
shuttles, while still functioning well, are simply considered too
expensive to operate while NASA is also trying to develop and
build its next-generation spaceship.[ Gallery:
Building Space Shuttle Discovery ]

"There is not a single thing wrong with her," Lindsey said of
Discovery, the oldest of the shuttles."Every single system and
every piece of every system is working just like it's brand new."

Once it retires the shuttles, NASA will have to rely on Russian
Soyuz spaceships to get to the International Space Station until
American commercial companies start producing vehicles capable of
doing the job. No spaceship under development will be able to
carry so many crew members and so much cargo to the station as
the massive shuttles have.

"It's going to be sad when it's over, when we land tomorrow or
the next day," Lindsey said."The hardest part of this for me is
giving up the capability. It can do everything except leave
low-Earth orbit."

Yet he said it was the right thing to do.

"It's sad to give up this type of capability, but I really
strongly believe in the next step to try to get out of low-Earth
orbit, to try to go to an asteroid, go to the moon," Lindsey
said. "We do need a new vehicle for that."

Other astronauts expressed similar sentiments.

"There are plenty of opportunities out there, and we're a great
country that has done really, really amazing things with our
space program and I really just hope that that will continue,"
mission specialist Nicole Stott said.